The Cost of Natural Medicine

If your car is making weird sounds, belching smoke and has lights flashing on the dash – You know it has symptoms that something is wrong.

Do you:

Google it and try to work it all out by yourself, find the parts and fix it

Ask your Facebook friends and make a group to solve the problem

Research for months and years while trying out different brands of oil or petrol to see if that might change it.

Or (unless of course you are qualified to fix the car),

Take it to a Mechanic who is trained to quickly find the cause and find a solution to the problem.

Hopefully the answer was (d). Answers (a)-(c) can waste precious time, money and raise stress while the problem gets worse and worse and ends up becoming very serious and very expensive.

As Naturopaths we constantly come across people who have waited too long and tried so many things that they are worn out, cynical and angry. They often have made huge changes to diet and lifestyle but still haven’t worked out how to be well. Whilst there are a lot of good products and excellent advice available from Google, Health Stores, etc, sometimes you can save yourself a lot of time and money by starting with an expert. Naturopaths are like the “mechanic” – we don’t diagnose disease (that is the responsibility of your Medical Doctor) but we are trained to assess the symptoms and find out what has caused them. This way we speed up the process and get on with improving optimal health.

The biggest hurdle we come across is the question of money (the elephant in the room). It does cost money to see a specialist – it costs money to have a clinic staffed and available, ready to help – and sadly in the case of Natural Medicine, it is not subsidised, so yes, again like the “mechanic” we have a cost.

And the supplements – they cost more too! Why is that? Whilst we would all like to think that we can get all we need nutritionally from our excellent diets, usually by the time we have symptoms, diet alone is not enough to make therapeutic change. Therefore it is necessary in the short term to supplement specific nutrients to support healing or change.

Practitioner only products may seem to cost a little more than other brands also. This is because they are guaranteed to be prescription grade (unlike the food grade found in food shops). They are designed to create specific nutritional or biochemical changes in the body that when properly administered address the cause or symptoms being indicated.

This usually means you end up taking a small concentrated dose, rather than either needing to take high quanties of supplements (along with high quantities of fillers and stabilisers), or taking a dose that makes no change. Both of these options usually ends up costing you more in the long term and sadly creates a discouraging view of natural medicine.

Self prescribing is also a concern. Natural Medicine is powerful stuff! You need to be careful with many herbs. Some herbs or minerals should not be mixed with others; or may interfere with medication, particularly the contraceptive pill, antidepressant medication and heart medication. Self prescribing can lead to people taking dangerously high doses of vitamins or minerals, that instead of helping become toxic and difficult for the body to assimilate or detoxify. So it’s REALLY important to get good advice from someone who can make sure that your supplementation is not only safe, but will be effective. Natural Medicine can even support conventional (chemical) medicine. You don’t need to feel substandard.

With all of this said. If you have got an issue that has not been resolved, please call us and let us take the load off your shoulders while we assess the cause of your symptoms and work towards optimal health for you and your family.